Wowhead Weekly is a World of Warcraft podcast with Wowhead Site Manager Perculia and Video Manager TradeChat where all the recent Blizzard news and Wowhead developments are discussed. You can subscribe to our YouTube Channel to see every episode. We also livestream each episode Friday afternoons, starting at 6pm EST, on twitch.tv/wowhead. If you subscribe to our twitch channel, you can get Pepe and rocket emotes!

Gear Shop Discount Code

We have a new code for the Blizzard Gear Shop through the month of July! WOWHEAD15JULY gets you 15% off any home and office merchandise. This is not just limited to Warcraft merchandise--it applies to merchandise for any Blizzard franchise.

Replica of Lady Taria's Dagger

Weta Workshop, the company which crafted all of the Warcraft Movie weapons, also offers replicas of some of the most famous weapons. However, one important weapon was missing: Lady Taria's Dagger, otherwise known as the dagger Garona uses in battle.

Good news for collectors: Lady Taria's Dagger is being added to the replica series and should be available around the holidays:

Followup to the PvP Q&A

The Legion PVP Q&A answered many questions about the new prestige and honor systems in Legion, but there were several more unanswered topics. Holinka and the community team have been discussing more topics on the forums:

Desvin

Hi, this is Brian Holinka and our good folks on the community team asked if I could help address some of your concerns. I understand that it's frustrating when you feel your question didn't get addressed. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we weren't able to address every question that was sent our way. But, we did answer over 25 questions that were submitted on the forum and over twitter. I know people feel like we were repeating information at times, but keep in mind, all of these questions were submitted to us. Someone out there did not know the answer and asked. While many community members are in tune with everything going on in the Legion Beta, a lot of other people are not.

I'll do my best to answer the questions below that you felt were very important but we didn't get to.

Why have there been almost no Blue responses on the beta PVP forum? PVE players get issues responded to promptly, but the PVP players have given massive amounts of feedback and it has all been ignored.

I think it's fair to say we haven't been as active on the PvP beta forums as many people there would have liked. We certainly visited the forums quite a bit, reading the forums as a part of our feedback process. We frequently used information there in our internal discussions and adjusted a number of honor talents as direct result. But it's true that we didn't post there that often. We'll discuss with community how we can better manage that experience for you. We just got really focused on making the game.

Why has PVP tuning been so slow? PVE tuning showed rapid changes, but with only two months left to go issues like melee classes having 100% uptime on ranged have no even begun to be addressed.

There are a few reasons it feels like PvP tuning has been slow. The primary reason is bad communication on our part. We've made PvP specific adjustments to over 80 spells and adjusted the PvP templates on every spec. But we haven't kept everyone up to date on what's been changing. We should have done a better job. The second reason is that our PvP systems are new in Legion. As an example, our PvP stat template system wasn't properly granting the extra stats casters get from their weapon. Unfortunately, this is part of the game development process. Things aren't always working as expected in Beta. Regardless, communication was our primary failing here and we will do better.

With respect to melee mobility specifically, we did discuss that at 1:10 in the interview.

What will be done about rating deflation in rated PVP? Due to dwindling player number players who previously had 2600+ ratings are now fighting over 2100, the loss of players is heavily deflating rating which is tied to how likely good gear is to drop and Blizzard has done nothing.

There is a tradeoff to using fixed ratings for rewards and one of them is that each season ratings are different. We have always seen this across regions. For example, Korea and Taiwan are far smaller than North America and Europe. Achieving high ratings in some brackets there is extremely difficult. For titles like Gladiator, we always use percentages to ensure the prestige of the reward remains the same. But the primary purpose of the rating gated rewards like the Elite gear set is to give players immediate rewards for hitting specific rating milestones. The upside of this system is you can get the rewards immediately, which feels great. The downside is that sometimes those rewards are harder to get. We think it's an acceptable tradeoff.

Looking at the current season data and comparing it with the past two seasons, I don't see the drop off in rating you're talking about. Perhaps some brackets have fallen 50-100 points, but by no means has anything fallen 500 points. That's just not accurate.

Why are completely unrelated spells on the same diminishing returns category? Cyclone and dragon's breath are both under the fear category.

Before the Diminishing Return (DR) system was introduced into WoW, "stunlocking" was a common phenomenon. DR prevented "stunlocking" but it feels crappy to use ability only to see "immune." DR categories were added so a class can use their different crowd control spells to full effect at least once but repeated application would not result in "stunlock."

Over time the number of categories increased to 12 which we consider an unacceptable number. In Warlords, it was reduced to 5 categories: Root, Silence, Stun, Disorient and Incapacitate. Roots, Stuns and Silences are fairly easy to recognize as their behavior is generally the same across all spells. There are a number of spells in the game that remove player control but break on some degree of damage. We did not want all of these spells on a single DR category. For example, Fear, Cyclone and Dragon's Breath are on the Disorient category while Polymorph, Sap and Freezing Trap are on the Incapacitate category. It is not necessary that all of the spells on each DR category are thematically or functionally the same. We primarily placed these spells in their respective categories for gameplay reasons. In some cases it is meant to allow a class to use all of their spells without overlapping DR categories. In other cases, it is meant to disrupt synergies between classes that can chain to much crowd control together. In the case of Dragon's Breath, Mages have Polymorph which is an Incapacitate. Dragon's Breath is a Disorient so that you can cast those two spells one after the other and get their full effect.

We're satisfied with the current assignment of crowd control spells to their respective DR categories, but please let us know if you have any feedback about them.

Why has all stat customisation been stripped from PVP? Players can no longer choose anything about their character's stats.

If you'd like to see my answer to this question, it was addressed at 42:50 in the twitch interview. The short answer is that some stat combinations are problematic for PvP gameplay and we'd like to be able to reign them in. We also feel like Honor Talents can fill the customization gap that has been lost. But we're also open to introducing Honor talents in the future that offer some stat customization. Let us know how you feel about that idea.

Why did you break your promise regarding instanced PVP having a flat power level for everyone? We were told that high rated players wouldn't have a gear advantage over lower rated players, but you've since backtracked and all you've done is remove the ability to customise and left in the gear imbalance.

I apologize if there was some confusion, but I did not make any such promise. I just rewatched the interview where I first discussed the PvP templates with Bajheera during the third NA qualifier cup last year. During that interview, I laid out the system as it is today in Legion including that higher ilevel gear would offer more power and that higher rated players would receive higher ilevel gear. I'm sorry if that message got lost along the way, but I certainly have never misrepresented how the system would work.

Why won't PVP templates be active in world PVP? If imbalances are fixed via those templates as you plan, what is the reasoning behind deliberately unbalanced individual interactions in world PVP?

I discussed our reasoning behind why PvP templates do not activate in the world at 40:55. In short, the two reasons were that they would provide a significant power increase for ungeared players and we'd like there to be a place in World of Warcraft where balance is far less structured.

I hope this helps fill in some gaps left by the interview. We tried to answer some questions that weren't really favorable to us like "why aren't you making new battlegrounds?" and "why is all the gear coming from strongboxes?" Many consider the directions where heading on those issues controversial so we wanted to explain our reasoning.

댓글

Syndlock의 댓글

on 2016-07-02T17:23:41-05:00

Blizzard seems to have a lot of home & office gear on sale already, so this discount code on top of that is a very sweet deal. Now, if only my international shipping didn't cost an arm and a leg, things would be perfect!

perculia의 댓글

on 2016-07-02T18:02:43-05:00

What merchandise are you trying to use the code on? Make sure it is specifically in the home and office section, some things that seem like home decor are not classified as such, like the wall hangs.

Purgatorywolf의 댓글

on 2016-07-02T18:23:13-05:00

So much awesome merch coming out! So much money envy, lol.

KenjiT28의 댓글

on 2016-07-02T18:27:15-05:00

I can confirm that the discount code does work, used it a few moments ago to get 15% off a towel :-)

Frozzen의 댓글

JaceDraccus의 댓글

Judging from a blue post, the recent Demon Invasion test did not go well...

Personally, I figure it's anywhere from mid-July to end-July.

CtanTheInsane의 댓글

on 2016-07-03T09:52:05-05:00

The discount code is work perfectly here. Big thanks to Wowhead and Blizzard. I was sad when I see the Summer Sale miss those fluffy horde blankets what I looking for a while, but the Wowhead cupon code saved the day. :)

dankmankrank의 댓글

on 2016-07-03T11:03:03-05:00

I wonder if the dagger will be functional or not. Like will it be made of high carbon steel or just cheap stainless?

AeronPeryton의 댓글

on 2016-07-04T00:56:01-05:00

I wonder if the dagger will be functional or not. Like will it be made of high carbon steel or just cheap stainless?

Should be able to pierce the neck of a king well enough either way. :P

Vancleeeeef의 댓글

on 2016-07-05T04:20:53-05:00

I, personally, would be fine with a pvp stat affinity. You choose between Haste/Versatility/Mastery/Crit, and are given increased points to one.

LyssaWoW의 댓글

on 2016-07-05T08:26:03-05:00

why not about whens prepatch

When it'sready.

Judging from a blue post, the recent Demon Invasion test did not go well...

Personally, I figure it's anywhere from mid-July to end-July.

Since when have these "let's have whole servers descend on one phased area of a zone" events ever gone well for Blizzard? *cough* Garrisons *cough*. I still remember days of "so... who's garrison are we in?" after WoD launch. :D

I think pre-patch release is still on course for early August like pretty much everyone has been saying since the expansion release date got announced. It would not be in Blizzard's best interest to release it too early to get people back in the game just to ask them to farm the same event for 6 weeks before anything new comes to the game after 14 months of patch 6.2.

tr1gger의 댓글

on 2016-07-06T14:00:57-05:00

Was in the process of buying all 6 and the code wasn't valid for them. /cry